Table of Contents
| Prologue: Sailor on a Chain | 1 |
| Part 1 | Sailing To War | |
| 1 | All Aboard | 13 |
| 2 | Good-bye, Golden Gate | 39 |
| 3 | The First Domino | 63 |
| Part 2 | Sunk | |
| 4 | The Burning Sea | 91 |
| 5 | Abandon Ship | 119 |
| 6 | Hope Afloat | 139 |
| 7 | Shark Attack | 163 |
| 8 | Genocide | 183 |
| Part 3 | Rescue | |
| 9 | Dead Drift | 209 |
| 10 | Final Hours | 237 |
| 11 | Aftermath | 251 |
| 12 | Back in the World | 269 |
| Epilogue | 277 |
| Notes | 283 |
| Bibliography | 301 |
| Author's Note | 313 |
| Index | 323 |
Interviews & Essays
Survivor Story: Getting In Harm's Way
From the May-June 2001 issue of Book
magazine.
Just after midnight on July 30, 1945, the USS Indianapolis, having dropped off Little Boy -- the atomic bomb that would devastate Hiroshima -- was sunk by a Japanese submarine about 550 miles east of Guam in the middle of the shark-infested waters of the South Pacific.
Of the men who abandoned ship, fewer than 200 found life rafts. Some clung to floater nets, while the rest bobbed in huddled groups along a jagged line that would sprawl some twenty miles during the next five days. Captain Quint, the fictional Indianapolis survivor from Steven Spielberg's 1975 blockbuster Jaws, had the numbers wrong but the horror right: "1,100 men went into the water and 316 came out," Robert Shaw's character said. "The sharks took the rest of 'em."
Did a distress call ever reach naval command in Leyte, the small island in the Philippines that served as the Indy's destination on that voyage? Why didn't the Navy rescue the sailors sooner? Should their captain -- who was court-martialed for his role in the tragedy -- have gotten the blame? These are among the questions writers and historians have focused on. What they hadn't looked at -- until now -- is the human story. That's what Doug Stanton decided to do with In Harm's Way: The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors.
"I'm young enough that many of my acquaintances, when I ask them, don't exactly know when Victory over Europe [V-E Day] was, or in what year the Battle of Iwo Jima was fought," says Stanton, thirty-nine, a successful magazine journalist who has contributed to Esquire, Outside, Sports Afield, and Men's Journal. "Two million soldiers died in World War II, and that we've forgotten how and when is remarkable to me. Certainly, they don't know when the Indianapolis was sunk. And if they have even heard of the Indy, invariably it's a snippet of abstract history or they remember it as 'that boat' talked about in Jaws."
In the summer of 1999, a newspaper item describing a planned reunion for the remaining survivors -- some 130 men -- caught Stanton's eye. At about the same time, Sid Evans, an editor at Men's Journal, saw a newscast on the efforts of the crewmates to exonerate their captain; it included a piece on the planned reunion. They agreed: The story of men enduring five days at sea might have the edge needed for a short feature article.
"A few weeks later, I was on a plane to Indianapolis," Stanton says, where he met about eighty-five of the reunited shipmates during the three-day event. He discovered that their part of the story had never been told. How did these men triumph over the Pacific Ocean that for five days tried to kill them? It was a storyteller's gold mine, and the writer was captivated.
"I always wanted to write something worthwhile and eternal," says Stanton, whose office, months after he turned in his final manuscript, is still filled with photographs of the Indianapolis and the crew that made it out alive. "I remember how strange and overwhelming it was talking to those men after looking at the long list of sailors who died -- realizing that, back then, all of them were boys, nearly all in their late teens and early twenties. Seeing them now as older men, listening to them pour their hearts out to me, I felt an obligation to tell their story."
When he began the project, Stanton was nearly twenty years older than the average seaman who served on the Indianapolis. He graduated in 1989 with an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Iowa and, after a short stint as a teacher, turned to journalism, making a career of writing adventure and travel articles, along with celebrity profiles, for men's magazines. He took yoga lessons from Sting, went on tour with John Mellencamp, hung out in Hawaii with Woody Harrelson, rode co-pilot in Harrison Ford's de Havilland Beaver, and shot hoops with George Clooney. Adventure assignments sent him three times to Argentina and Mexico in the wake of the Zapatista movement. Stanton was harassed and robbed at gunpoint. Once, on assignment, he nearly drowned in a lake while rounding Cape Horn. This all served as fodder for tales in magazines that, as Stanton puts it, often tend to "celebrate the exile of the aged." But when he stumbled onto the Indy story -- gleaned from the memories of old veterans -- he recognized it as "probably the greatest I'll ever get to tell, a story of ordinary men suffering something extraordinary."
What was to be a 5,000-word story of the at-sea disaster and the remaining crew's attempt to clear Captain Charles Butler McVay's name soon turned into a 35,000-word manuscript that Stanton submitted to Men's Journal hoping it could be run in serial installments.
"I knew right away he had a book," says Evans. "It was a very human story, a vivid account of survival. We published 12,000 words, the longest story ever published in my three years with the magazine."
Stanton quickly had a handful of publishers vying for the book rights. A bidding war broke out. The New York Post estimated Holt's bid at $400,000, while the film rights were sold to Warner Bros. And as if to provide a happy ending, McVay was finally absolved some months after the March 2000 piece ran -- largely due to declassified documents revealing that the captain had received bogus intelligence reports regarding sub activity in the waters where the Indianapolis was sunk, and to testimonials from Navy operators.
The Shipwreck: The Indianapolis was a heavy cruiser, the length of two football fields, but it sank to the bottom of the Philippine Sea in twelve minutes. Of the 1,196 men onboard, only 321 -- including McVay -- endured the horror of the ensuing days.
Most of the sailors were asleep when the torpedoes hit. Just past midnight, two explosions pounded the ship, hurling the men from their bunks and from their dreams into a nightmare that would envelop them for the next five days.
The first blast obliterated sixty-five feet of the bow, killing more than a hundred men and showering those on deck with shrapnel and burning fuel. The second opened a gaping hole midship where the fuel tanks were located. Sailors not burned, injured, or killed emerged topside to find the ship listing hard to starboard and the deck illuminated by fire. Most of the electric and communications systems were dead.
McVay was convicted and court-martialed for "hazarding the ship by failing to zigzag" -- a maneuver to avoid detection by Japanese subs. Stanton found that books previously written on the event -- among them, Richard Newcomb's recently reissued 1958 Abandon Ship! and Raymond Lech's 1982 All the Drowned Sailors -- dealt primarily with this aspect of the tragedy and spent little time on what happened to the men in the water.
"The Navy's involvement in the scapegoating of McVay is obviously a tremendous part of the tale," Stanton says, "but the heart of the story, as I saw it, was in the drama of the sailors enduring the most hideous conditions imaginable. I tried to imagine myself floating out there in the water with no hope of survival. Why not give up? Why not just say 'Screw it all' and drown? Here also were the lessons of history -- and a generation. The story of these men, at its core, is about very old values of duty, honor and sacrifice, courage and faith."
Those in the water had to go five days without food and water. They were covered in oil from swimming in the slick spreading from the ruptured fuel tanks. The oil caused blindness and, if swallowed, violent vomiting attacks. Some, delirious from hunger and thirst, went insane and killed one another. Most were killed by sharks that found the sailors the first night and hunted them every hour after, pulling men off floater nets in mid-conversation or driving into huddled groups of screaming swimmers and ripping them away one by one.
Days and nights passed, and in the throes of delirium, some mistook crewmates for Japanese and began stabbing and trying to drown those they believed had come to kill them. Others saw dancing girls and tropical islands in the distance. Some imagined the ghost ship of the Indy on the horizon or hovering below them in the water. Any sailor lured away by the visions got ripped apart by sharks or drowned.
Whether by shark, suicide, murder caused by their frenzied delusions, or by simply succumbing to the tortures of being adrift, the sailors died, Stanton found, at a rate of one every ten minutes. By the fourth day, most had given up on being rescued. And as the survivors would later discover, the Navy didn't even know they were gone.
When the men were eventually discovered, it was not by a search plane sent to find them. Little more than a decade ago, declassified documents revealed that naval intelligence knew Japanese submarines were operating between Guam and Leyte. Low-flying Ventura PV-1 bombers -- submarine hunters -- were regularly dispatched to patrol the area, and it was on one such mission that a pilot spotted the oil slick left by the Indianapolis and, eventually, what remained of the crew.
The government released word of the sinking eleven days after the rescue -- August 14. Three days after the sailors were saved, the Enola Gay dropped its cargo on Hiroshima, killing 120,000 people and helping bring an end to the war. Shortly after President Truman announced the surrender of Japan, the Navy was recommending a court-martial for McVay.
Finding the Story: Stanton made sense of the crew's agony by uncovering the meaning of the survivors' stories (a vexing task, as each man took something different from the horror he endured). One of the more salient ideas he found was put forth by the ship's doctor, Lewis Haynes, who becomes one of the central figures in In Harm's Way. While "waiting for a death that seemed inevitable," Stanton says, Haynes "felt rise within him something 'purer' about his life, about the will to live courageously."
In Harm's Way became a narrative celebrating the indomitable human spirit in the face of human suffering and war. So vivid are the accounts that a reader can't help but ask the questions, "What would I do? Would I have what it takes to stay alive?"
Jennifer Barth, the book's editor at Holt, remembers that when the initial draft came across her desk, she thought it was a "typical guy story." She wasn't very interested in the project, but Stanton, she says, "managed to put a human face on this war." A fiction editor who worked with Dennis McFarland on his recent novel Singing Boy, as well as with Paul Auster and Elizabeth Graver, Barth says she connected with Stanton's approach. Three main figures emerge in the narrative -- the marine private Gil McCoy, Haynes, and McVay.
After his first meeting with the crew members in Indianapolis, Stanton traveled from his home in northern Michigan to Florida, where many of the survivors reside. "I flew down and rented a car, and for nearly a month I rode around conducting interviews." Speed, he realized, was of the essence, because time was catching up with the characters in the story. While visiting with McCoy, Stanton learned that three members of the Indy's crew had recently died, all in the same month. Old age was silencing the men that the sea couldn't a half century before.
Stanton's research for In Harm's Way encompassed everything from learning about the development of the first atomic bomb and the top-secret role the Indianapolis played in its delivery to studying the effects of hypothermia, dehydration, and starvation on the human body. And, of course, there were sharks to learn about: makos, tigers, white-tips, and blues. "There was so much suffering to know," Stanton says.
In August 1999, Stanton traveled to the house in Connecticut where McVay lived after the government ruined him. The only captain in U.S. naval history to be court-martialed for the sinking of a ship during wartime, McVay became the Navy's scapegoat for the Indianapolis disaster. He lived until he was seventy, blamed all those years for the tragedy by the families of those who had perished. They sent hate mail over the years, always on Christmas and around the anniversary of the sinking. Stanton went to the house McVay called Winivan Farm and stood on the same porch where McVay lay down on a windy morning in 1968 and killed himself with a Navy-issue .38 revolver.
But the story really came together one night during the year spent writing and researching In Harm's Way when Stanton said he was "in the grip of the story." He got in his car and drove twenty miles to the Lake Michigan shoreline -- and there he found the beach deserted.
"Lake Michigan is no ocean," he admits, "but when the sun set, I learned of the bone-chilling cold that descended upon the men. Within fifteen minutes, I felt the terror of being eaten alive. I left the lake, unsure of what I would do if I had been lost in an ocean filled with sharks. My mind, I sensed, would come totally unhinged."
Impetus: There's something that drives every writer who sets out to tell a monumental story. In the opening pages of In Harm's Way, Stanton relays a story his father tells of a young army private, a soldier from World War II, and an event that, though unrelated to the Indianapolis tragedy, he attributes to how he would finally "come to meet the men of the Indy."
"My father was a very young boy in 1943 when Leonard Dailey, an Army private on leave, came walking down the street with his girlfriend and asked my father if he wanted to go to the fair. This was a time in America when a stranger could knock on your door and you would agree to let him take your seven-year-old son for the day.
"My father remembers that day as one of the happiest in his childhood. Leonard, home for a couple of weeks and no doubt living it up before heading back to the war, bought him candy and took him on rides. But my father remembers most how Leonard just seemed to be enjoying himself.
"Afterward, the soldier dropped him at home and gave him the green campaign hat off his head. Leonard returned to the war. And my father's memory of that day would begin to fade, until about a year later. Leonard had been killed overseas and buried over there, and his body was finally being returned to the family plot.
"When he learned this, something akin to a storm of guilt and sadness hit my father. He looked around the house for the old campaign hat Leonard had given him. The memories of that day, long forgotten, now flooded back. What, my father wondered, did it mean that he'd forgotten all about Leonard? Who remembers us if we don't remember each other?
" 'Don't you ever forget,' my father told me, 'what anybody does for you.' "
So if In Harm's Way is the next step in the path blazed by Into Thin Air and The Perfect Storm, it's also Stanton's way of paying something back. And by uncovering the meaning behind the suffering the men of the Indianapolis endured, he also defines a generation.
About that happy ending: Twenty-two years after McVay killed himself, the information found in declassified documents and testimonials from Navy operators led to President Clinton's signing the National Defense Authorization Act of 2001 in October 2000, which contained a section declaring that McVay's military record should now reflect that he is exonerated for the loss of the ship and the lives of its men. This was the culmination of an effort of more than forty years by the survivors and their supporters to win public vindication of their captain and to finally put to rest what happened in the waters of the Philippine Sea those five days in the summer of 1945.
That's one of the final pieces of a story that Stanton, after ten years of work as a writer, was fortunate enough to be able to tell; it's the story that may turn him into this year's Sebastian Junger. But amid the talk of movies, television interviews, and future book deals, Stanton is still surrounded by those photographs -- of the men whose stories he's committed to the page -- filling his office in an old outbuilding behind his family's rustic northern Michigan farm. The book has been finished for months, but Stanton hasn't yet filed away the events of the Indianapolis sinking. Cluttered upon his desk are books on sharks, transcripts of interviews with members of the crew, and volumes dedicated to survival, shipwrecks, and the sea.
Stanton knows what he wants to accomplish with In Harm's Way, and he knows who he wants to accomplish it for: The Indianapolis crew: 1,196 sailors, living and dead. "I want the men to like it," he says. The story, its teller recognizes, is for them, and for their captain. (Bob Butz)
Read an Excerpt
A few men were vomiting so violently that they were actually doing somersaults in the water. Trying to keep his wits, Dr. Haynes called out, "Here! Right here! Where is the sick sailor?" And then he moved into the throng. It was not a happy sight. In the crowd, about a dozen sailors were holding a body aloft, an incredible feat of strength considering they were all treading water furiously to stay afloat beneath the added weight.
The man in question was in terrible shape. His eyes had been burned away. The flesh on his hands was gone and what remained were bare tendons. The boys held him in an effort to keep these terrible wounds out of the salt water. Haynes recognized the man as his good friend and liberty buddy, gunnery officer Stanley Lipski. Miraculously, Lipski had made his way blind from the quarterdeck, off the ship, and into the water.
Haynes knew that Lipski's pain must be unbearable-- he himself could barely look at his old friend, who was moaning softly. Stanley, he knew, was one tough bird; Haynes also understood that he didn't have long to live. Reluctantly, he turned away to those he could actually help.
(17 ratings)
Great Story of Survival in an Excellent Book
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